


But Can They Suffer?

by Unrepentant_Marvelite



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - 1960s, BAMF Charles, Canon Disabled Character, Captivity, Dehumanization, F/M, Human Experimentation, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Pack Dynamics, animal rights
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-06-02 17:15:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6574993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unrepentant_Marvelite/pseuds/Unrepentant_Marvelite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Homo sapiens deterior has developed parallel to the human species for millennia. Mostly, they have kept to themselves but stories of their interactions with humans are woven throughout history, literature and folklore. It's only been since the end of WWII that the world has really had the time and energy to pay close attention to them. Unfortunately, now they are the subject of the full weight of Mankind's curiosity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Methods of Deduction](https://archiveofourown.org/works/524324) by [Tawabids](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids). 
  * Inspired by [Searchlight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/252202) by [Red](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/pseuds/Red). 



> Please please please read and kudos the spectacular original works by Red and Tawabids before this. I love those pieces and woke up one night after rereading them only to vomit this up all over my hard drive.

They had to bring Charlie in from the main enclosure before dawn to have him prepped in time for the Searchlight boys to get the early start they demanded. They shaved his head smooth and hosed him off while he was still drowsy enough not to hiss or snap too badly at the handling. This part, at least, was familiar to him.

Then they tried to bring him straight into the busy Searchlight mainframe to begin the live calibration.

He lit up the second they brought him in, the unfamiliar equipment, the excitement of the techs, the hum of the mainframe and bustle of activity all making him nervous and agitated. He spat and snarled at the handlers when they tried to drag him into the new, unsettling space. I stepped in then, suggesting they rework things so Charlie didn’t have to be in the main room with them all for the testing. This insanity nearly blew the roof off with an explosion of scholarly indignation. _There’s no way we can run it like that!, What on Earth are you thinking, MacTaggert?!, Do you know how long it would take to set that up? Why are we bending over backwards just because It’s a little skittish? Can’t you DO something?!_ I offered again to sedate him just as we’d done for the hundreds of other runs before but they tore their hair in exasperation. _It will interfere with the calibrations! The point of this is to go live by the end of today! We can’t do anything more with It unconscious! We need It awake!_ Yes, I understood, of course, but as I’d pointed out in countless meetings and memos before today, a fully-conscious subject was a very different beast from a drugged-to-the-eyeballs comatose one. Yet, they still failed to grasp the essential difference, buried as they were amidst their pages of readouts and calculations.

So I decided to compromise. In spite of much grumbling and protest, I cleared the room. Charlie got a small dose of sedative, enough to make him blink owlishly and stumble like a drunkard when dragged to his feet and back into the room. He growled low in his throat when he saw where he was. He tried to drop into an aggressive crouch, weight on the balls of his feet, ready to spring for the throat of an enemy or dart away under a blow, but he couldn’t keep his balance. He fell back onto his bum and wrestled a little with the lead as he tried to get back up. We let him have some slack then. Free to shamble about woozily, he poked at the mainframe towers, tore at some papers, hissed a few times at the cooling fans and eventually settled onto his haunches under a desk. The warmth generated by the sheer mass of computer in the room was enough to lull him to sleep.

The boys moaned about lost time and productivity for a solid twenty minutes before wandering off to find more coffee. But, by the time the sedative wore off an hour later, Charlie was comfortable enough to let them approach. A few chunks of sweet melon and some gentle encouragement and he was seated in the chair, tense and wary, but content enough to let them attach the wires to his scalp and connect him to the machine.

They ran their calibrations and tests all morning. Charlie did well, for the most part. He watched them with that same uncanny, silent fascination that so unsettled the scientists for nearly the entire morning run. Only towards noon did he begin to show signs of boredom and impending crankiness. I gave him my house keys to fiddle with and he settled immediately, running his hands over the metal, sticking them in his mouth and watching the way they jangled and sparkled in the light. _You coddle that thing,_ they sneered when we broke for lunch. That’s my job, I reminded them as I crushed vitamin supplements and added them to the barley-and-beef gruel Charlie got for good behavior on testing days. I thought about letting him have raspberries too but decided against it; he was just as likely to smash them and paint his chest with the sticky juice as he was to eat them. The Searchlight boys could not be any less interested in the body-adornment behaviors of the _Homo sapiens deterior_ if they tried. _Save your pet project for your own time, MacTaggert_ , they would say as they’d said so many times before. Better to avoid the argument and save the raspberries for this evening when they sent him back to the enclosure.

Charlie was squatting on the floor under the desk again, sucking at the marrowbones from his lunch contentedly when they all filed back in. They took the bones from him and he scowled and vocalized a little until the handler yanked on his lead. Then he crawled out slowly and sat back in the testing chair giving them all a nasty look. He was thoroughly ignored, however, by the room at large. They were ready to go live for the first time with the rudimentary program. The team leader announced, in a carrying voice, the calibration for this first test sequence and all stations reported in that they were within parameters, ready for the trial run.

Charlie was sensitive to the change in tension in the room. He stopped sulking at once and pulled away, even snapping a little as they adjusted the wires streaming off his head. The handler tightened the lead around his neck, choking off a snarl as it started. They were in no mood for delays.

 _Begin the sequence_ , the leader said when everything was settled. The boys started their run and Charlie frowned. Every iteration previously, he had hardly seemed bothered by their testing. He pulled away out of annoyance or petulance rather than fear or pain. The countless passive readings were no more worrisome to him than a gnat landing on his bare leg.

This, however, was another matter entirely.

As the sequence cranked up, they began their first attempt at active data collection. Charlie’s scowl quickly became a grimace which squeezed his eyes shut and peaked in a surprised shout. He sprang from the chair as though electrified and began clawing at the wires on his head. The handler yanked on the lead, the yelp turned to choking and coughing and Charlie crumpled to the ground, scientists and handlers grabbing for his hands, trying to keep him from destroying any of the fragile equipment. The room was in uproar. Scientists shouting about positive results, crying over broken equipment, screeching in fright as Charlie thrashed about, bloodied on the floor and locked in a wrestling match with three of his handlers. I tried to push my way into the fray, sedative at the ready, but there was a press of bodies suddenly scrambling to get away.

I felt it then.

The awful, teeth-grinding, whine of white noise, the pressure building at the base of my skull so fast and hard surely something would burst. The scientists were screaming, scattering as fast as they could. One of the handlers dropped, blood pouring out of his eyes and ears and nose. Another doubled up and vomited spectacularly all over the floor. It was only quick reflexes and good training that had the last swinging his baton even as his scored his scalp in a futile effort to vent the pressure building in his skull.

The blow rang true and Charlie’s head cracked against the floor when he collapsed in a dead faint.

The pain let up immediately, like breaking the surface, gasping for air after nearly drowning. My vision swam, tears leaked out as I tried to recover. Slowly, I got to my feet. I made sure the others were all right (relatively so, anyway) before giving Charlie the rest of the sedative, a single shot into the big muscle of his buttocks. The bump on his head was just that, only a bump and nothing more serious. It was enough to ensure he would wake up with a hell of a headache tomorrow even if the machine hadn’t already decided that.

I could only shake my head as they dragged him bonelessly back to the enclosures. In the three years since I had taken over as Chief Veterinary Officer, I thought we had made enough progress with his training that he knew not to _ever_ lash out telepathically at any of the human keepers. If there was one behavior we had been sure to discourage as aggressively as possible, it was that one. The threat was too great for there to be any break in discipline here. It would be at least three straight days in isolation for him now: no food, no contact with the other hive members and no moving outside of the eight by eight concrete room of the iso pen. If he was anything less than completely compliant and submissive by the end of it, the period would be extended.

It seemed cruel, but it was truly for the creature’s own good. As useful as he was, as much money as had been invested in his welfare and keeping, if he proved too dangerous to keep in captivity, the board members would not hesitate to have him destroyed. Keeping Charlie was, after all, an experiment in it of itself.

“Charlie” was the only fully-telepathic specimen of _H. s. deterior_ to be kept alive this long in captivity. The data from his keeping thus far alone was enough to satisfy universities full of specialists for decades to come. Everything else, even the hefty military contract that came with the Searchlight Project, was really just icing on the cake if it proved too dangerous to keep the telepath in captivity.

\---

Three days later, they were eager to try again. They were irritated when I told them they had to wait for the isolation period to end before another run. If you break it early, I explained for the umpteenth time, he won’t get the message and it will damage the conditioning. But the threat of another telepathic outburst was enough to quiet the grumbling for a little longer. That, and the fact that Hanson, the handler who’d received the brunt of it, was “out sick” recovering for the next two weeks.

When we pulled Charlie out of the iso pen, he was very different from the young, alpha male we’d originally put in. He was subdued and twitchy now, flinching at shadows and harsh tones. His right eye was swollen closed and he also had several bruises I didn’t remember seeing when I’d checked him over after the incident three days ago. He held his arm stiffly too, next to his chest as though trying to brace a cracked rib. There was nothing to be done for it now, however. We were on a schedule and the handlers had to give him a good scrubbing ( _H. s. deterior_ normally buried his waste in the wild and practiced the same in our main enclosure but, after three days indoors, the young male smelled terribly) before taking him into the testing center.

The Searchlight boys had learned their lesson from last time. When we started towards the mainframe room, they redirected us to a quiet suite down the hall with bare walls and one-way glass isolating a control room. I turned up the heat and gave Charlie an apple while they sat him in the chair and set up their wires that tracked all the way back to the mainframe. He sat quietly and gulped his first food in days down to the seeds and stem. Then he licked the remaining juice from his fingers and sucked on the seeds before I made him spit them back out. He hardly grumbled at all during the set up, only whimpering a little when one of the techs bumped the sore spot on his head. Then we emptied the room of everyone except the tech running the switches nearest to Charlie and a few of the handlers. I watched from behind the one-way glass as he started to tremble during the calibration runs. It was obvious when they switched over to data collection as Charlie immediately tried to get up out of the chair and peel off the electrodes on his head. They told me ahead of time that they’d redone some calculation and turned the amplitude down to minimize his reaction with these early tests. It was certainly milder than before but the handlers still had to hold him in place through the rest of the sequence. He vocalized more and more as they finished the run and the scientists responded in kind by complaining about how the handlers’ proximity was affecting their readings.

So they switched to straps on the arms of the chair for the next few tests. Charlie kicked up when they tried to pull his arm away from bracing his side and even gave a half-hearted snap at the tech who tied down his hand. It was certain now that I’d have to look at those ribs when we were through, maybe wrap them if he started to show signs of troubled breathing.

Three hours later, he was limp in the chair and sweating profusely. I told them it was time for an early break; it was that or let Charlie pass out on his own from exhaustion and dehydration.

I brought in blankets and made a nest for him in the corner. He hardly reacted when the handlers hoisted him out of the chair and gave him slack on the lead. I coaxed him over and showed him the bowl of barley and sweet milk I had for him. He crawled over eventually and curled up in the blankets shivering. I put the bowel on the floor in front of him, afraid he’d spill it if I tried to hand it to him. He dipped his fingers in and scooped the gruel into his mouth slowly. As he ate, I gently cleaned the swollen eye and wrapped up his chest with wide bandages. It covered several of the tattoos on his back (which usually was something he never tolerated) but he hardly seemed to mind. Then I made him sip nearly a half-liter of water before finally letting him close his eyes and sleep.

When it came time to begin again, I woke him gently. He gave me one of those looks then, the type that make one understand immediately why our ancestors mistook these creatures for human or believed them to be magical half-human hybrids. There was such resignation and weariness in his gaze that, had he been human, surely he would have sighed aloud or perhaps burst into frustrated tears. As it was, he had neither the mental capacity to form such abstract emotions nor the ability to communicate them. He was merely mimicking a previously observed human behavior, as any number of other species would learn to do after prolonged exposure to humans. By the time he was tugged into position and ready for the next run, the expression was gone replaced by the blankness of an animal accepting its place in the hierarchy and submitting quietly.

He developed a peculiar behavior that afternoon. After tweaking the output frequency so their data recovery was optimized, Charlie began fidgeting. He lifted his legs from the floor and began writhing so they were close under his restrained hands. This gave everyone in the control room a completely unobstructed view of his genitals (and sparked some tittering and nudging from the younger research fellows.) A handler tried to make him sit still but he hissed and snapped until he maneuvered himself enough to scratch his knee. The handler laughed and made a lewd comment about that itch you can never quite scratch which started more giggles and furtive looks in my direction. Charlie ignored all this, however, and kept scratching. And scratching, and scratching until there were red streaks all down his legs. He was working on some truly impressive feats of flexibility in an attempt to get the bottoms of his feet when the chair finally tipped over. The electrodes ripped, technicians screeched, Charlie yelped and the handlers rushed forward to untangle everyone in a frighteningly-familiar mess. Charlie didn’t fight back this time, though. The moment his hands were free, he was too busy scratching his arms and chest to even protect his ribs properly. _What’s gone wrong with It now?_ I heard one of the handlers ask. They stood back and let him writhe and scratch himself on the floor until I came in and told them to stop dicking around and pull his hands away. Some of his efforts were breaking the skin and the last thing I wanted was to deal with open sores or a skin infection on top of everything else.

He whined and twitched unhappily as the boys held his hands off but, eventually, he wore himself out. He lay, unhappy and panting in a heap until the handlers hoisted him up again. They ended up dragging him halfway back to the main hive enclosure but, at least, there was no sign of recurrence of whatever pruritic sensation had accosted him earlier.

It was somewhat nerve-wracking to watch his reintroduction to the hive. It had been several days since they’d seen him last and there was always the question of how they would react to seeing their alpha male in such a weakened and unsettled state. I had toyed with the idea of just putting him back in isolation for the night, not as a punishment of course, but for his own good and the wellbeing of the hive. But in the end, the handlers convinced me it was easier just to stick him back with the others. That was one less pen they’d have to slop out in the morning, of course.

They sprayed water and blasted the air horn a few times before opening the heavy door to the enclosure. Dark figures scurried away into the shadows, fleeing from the noise and unexpected wet. In one practiced motion they unclipped Charlie’s lead from his collar and shoved him inside before the door slammed shut behind. From the observation booth, we could see on the new low-light cameras as he stumbled and recovered his footing without his usual grace. He hissed a little at the door but otherwise forewent any of the usual posturing that accompanied any change of environment. Even through the grainy picture of the cameras, he looked wilted and exhausted. If there were any bad blood, any leadership challenges we were unaware of in the hive, this would be the moment they would surface.

The cameras picked up motion at the edges of the enclosure, towards the shelters at the far end. Charlie began to shuffle towards them unknowingly and I held my breath. Searchlight and the rest of the research agencies didn’t care for the internal developments of the hive so long as its members remained relatively compliant and available for testing. As they so often reminded me, they didn’t care if the beasts were unhappy, so long as they were healthy and docile enough for good data collection. They completely rejected the fascinating opportunity to study the inner-workings of _H. s. deterior_ society as anything of scientific value.

Suddenly, one form materialized from the dark. It darted forward and set upon Charlie immediately. For a moment it was difficult to tell—but then the camera caught the flash of scales if not the blue of their distinctive shade. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Raven,” as the handlers called her for the distinctive yellow eyes and the habit of frequent cacophonous vocalization, was the alpha female of the hive. She was the least likely to harm Charlie and, indeed, as we watched she began fussing over him immediately, nuzzling him with her forehead, stroking his shaved head and petting his arms and abdomen. True, being seven-months pregnant meant the very-hormonal female fussed over everyone (even a young intern, during a memorable obstetrical check, had his hair groomed and picked for nonexistent lice by the nesting mother-to-be!) but her interaction with Charlie was always overly physical and affectionate.

When she didn’t get the usual enthusiastic reciprocation from her friend, Raven began barking at him and picking at the bandages still wrapped around his chest. He shrugged her away half-heartedly and continued to make his way slowly back to the shelters at the other end of the enclosure.

The other hive members were visible now. They gathered uneasily in a slow-moving clump around Charlie as he limped back. No one challenged him, no one made an aggressive move. Raven continued to nuzzle and whine the whole way back and became more visibly anxious the longer he refused to play along.

The shelters were low, three-sided concrete huts with cameras set into the roofs They satisfied the _H. s. deterior_ need to hide away and den in times of stress as well as kept them out of the inclement weather all without interfering with our observance of their behavior. We watched Charlie get carefully to the ground in the corner of the biggest shelter. They had old blankets and straw-stuffed mattresses to serve as bedding in place of the animal furs most hives used in the wild. Most of this was piled in the rear of the large shelter and Charlie crawled straight to the middle of it. His hive followed close behind.

He settled and curled into a ball, wincing as he jostled his cracked ribs. Raven immediately joined him and started grooming to help settle them both. He stroked her scaled thigh and closed his eyes beneath her ministrations. The rest of the hive, one by one, snuggled in beside them. In a great pile of limbs and tangled bodies, they soothed each other to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “The question is not, 'Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’”  
> Jeremy Bentham


	2. Chapter 2

We were clearly missing some critical element when it came to the relationship between the Charlie specimen and the female, Raven. It was one of the great mysteries of _H. s. deterior_ social interaction uncovered by the project: overt physical gestures, clear signs of attraction, a lack of other competition and yet still the alpha male refused to mate with an available female.

Raven had been first penned with Charlie in the early days of the project. There was no hive then, just the two specimens, a wild-caught male and one of the “urban” females, recently captured in a nearby city. Surly, we told ourselves, housing the two in the same unit would immediately result in a coupling and subsequent pregnancy. With Charlie’s status as the only known telepath to exist in captivity, breeding the trait into subsequent generations was paramount. But one, two, ten, twenty days in, not a single conjugal act appeared on our video monitors. Raven was very skittish at first but Charlie largely left her alone, ignored her in favor of the endless little piles of grasses and bits of plants he liked to play with on the enclosure ground.

She approached him one day when he played with a sticky paste of something. He seemed fascinated by the texture of it, mashing it between his fingers and chewing it into a sloppy mess only to spit the whole thing onto the ground and smear it about again with his hand. We had begun to worry, in those early days, that he was going insane from the isolation. Similar incidents had been reported all across the literature and, indeed, were blamed for the failure to thrive of any previous telepathic specimens once they were separated from their native hives. We had hoped the introduction of a fertile female would not only result in offspring but also keep the telepath from any further cognitive decline.

Raven had approached him then. She had squatted down beside him, halfway between the aggressive crouch the _H. s. deterior_ adopts when threatened and the submissive posture resting back on her knees. Charlie hardly acknowledged her. He kept playing, unconcernedly, with his paste. She reached out then, tentatively, and he batted her hand away with a hiss.

She hissed back!

They vocalized at each other for a while, becoming more demonstrative in their movements before finally reaching a crescendo where Charlie tossed his head back and _laughed._ Well, he hadn’t really laughed, of course. He made the strange, audible, rhythmic contractions of his vocal muscles that early primatologists had come to associate with _H. s. deterior_ amusement. It was an eerie thing to hear, that first time, after so many months of nothing but aggression and irritability out of him.

They were fast friends after that day. They wrestled and chased one another, just as the young did in the wild. There were grooming behaviors and protective demonstrations against the handlers from Charlie but still, no mating. The head handler, Terry Morgan, even called me at the crack of dawn one morning to report Charlie showing signs of physical arousal and masturbatory behavior but still! No mating between the two. It was frustrating, to say the least.

We began introducing other members to the hive, slowly after that. A few more males were added in hopes that one of them would try to copulate with Raven and maybe inspire something in Charlie. At the very least, if she became pregnant by another we could know for certain that she _could_ become pregnant. We had begun to wonder if, perhaps, Charlie was picking up on some esoteric symptom of infertility which caused her to be less desirable.

But alas, Charlie established dominance amongst the growing hive early and easily. Any overtures towards Raven by the new males were quashed before they even really began. Raven herself even chased off a young one who was slow to get the message. This was another urban-grown, salvaged as so many were, from a private-owner who had been calling his pet “Alex” until he had begun to grow out of the cute, “puppy-phase” and become a dangerous animal who could produce thermo-concussive energy and burn down his pen. He, like the others, hardly even looked at her again after that initial rejection.

Eventually, as time wore on, we received an offer from another lab for a mating opportunity with our Raven. The other lab presented an opportunity to answer our question of fertility once and for all. They had a stud there, apparently, who demonstrated high levels of viability with other pairings. We transferred Raven to them and, not ten days later, she was returned to us with confirmatory blood tests of conception!

Charlie reacted poorly at first to her pregnancy. Possibly he was uncomfortable with her carrying another male’s child or perhaps it was her changed demeanor that upset him so. Immediately after the insemination, she became withdrawn and skittish again for weeks. He was overly aggressive towards any attempts to remove her from the enclosure in those early days. He bit and scratched and fought bitterly with the handlers when they tried to take her for obstetric examinations. Twice, he even struck out telepathically at them and earned himself time in isolation for his bad behavior. This acting-out persisted for nearly a month before Raven got over whatever mood she’d been in. She began to venture out on her own again and pushed away Charlie’s efforts to coddle her.

Things settled down after that and the hive became more manageable. The Searchlight boys were happy with Charlie’s behavior and began making serious progress with their device. The other research heads had consistently good data from the other members due to their tamer behavior. The experiment on socialization appeared to be working.

Then, two months ago, we secured funding for a second female to add to the hive. The females were generally harder to catch live in the wild due to not only their tendency to be sequestered away deeper in the hives but also their susceptibility to early death in captivity. It was a common occurrence for the females to work themselves into such a state of distress at the moment of capture that they would harm themselves to the point of death trying to escape. The only available females were the growing number of _H. s. deterior_ trapped in the urban setting. In the cities and suburbs they lived as feral strays, feeding off of trash, vermin and any domesticated animals they could catch. Their natural habitats were increasingly surrendered to the march of civilization and many of the creatures were adopted as pets into private homes when they were young and appealing only to be turned out when they became “dangerous monsters” as soon as they reached maturity.

This new one was a younger specimen with wings the boys creatively began calling “Angel.” She too failed to illicit any interest in mating from Charlie but not from the other males. Within a week of her introduction we had learned more about the intimate details of _H. s. deterior_ mating rituals than we’d ever hoped. It was only a matter of time before she too fell pregnant.

Eventually, theories began flying around about whether _Charlie_ was the one with fertility problems. Could it be some instinct in their species to not attempt mating if there were some defect in the viability of potential offspring? Many of my research team were asking for a semen sample to analyze but, as of then, we had no protocol to obtain such a thing. Other animals were easy enough to breed because of their hormonal reflex behaviors when in the presence of a heating female. As far as we knew, no such reflex or hormonal trigger existed for the _H. s. deterior._

I presented the problem as an application question to the scores of young graduate students anxious to join our team. Submit a proposal for a protocol designed to obtain a viable semen sample from our alpha male, I told them, and do it in a cost-effective, repeatable manner and you have yourself an internship on our team.

The responses plagued our mail office for weeks. Every budding primatologist, zoologist, naturalist, animal behaviorist, and veterinarian in the United States, it seemed, had an answer for our problem.

One scientist suggested we harvest a sample from the enclosure itself after witnessing masturbatory activity. A practical idea, but one that proved impossible to achieve due to Charlie’s habit of either immediately kicking dirt over his ejaculate or actually _licking_ it up seemingly according to whim. We tried to isolate him inside for a week to keep the dirt away but he proved too anxious and high-strung to achieve a spontaneous erection for the entire period.

Another fellow proposed a method similar to the collection of semen from horses or other stock animals where the stud is isolated with a female separated by barrier to physically prevent copulation but not the sight, sound or smell of the female from arousing the male. This too was a futile effort; penning Raven and Charlie in together for a week separated by a chain-link fence only led to much whining and generally insolent and uncooperative behavior from the two of them.

In the end, a young PhD candidate named Simms from a veterinary college in California pitched the winning proposal. The man argued the _H. s. deterior_ anatomy was so similar in genitourinary structure to its primate cousins’ that the same physical stimuli resulting in ejaculation in simian males should work similarly for our specimen. He favored especially the technique pioneered by several labs in the South which had achieved repeatable results of high quality through the use of an electro-ejaculatory device and direct prostatic stimulation. When I expressed interest in his proposal, Simms wrote back immediately with a fully outlined procedure complete with the amperage and voltage settings for the electrical probe likely to yield the greatest results. I invited him to watch the trial run the following week.

Charlie was removed from the hive enclosure before dawn and immediately whisked away to the medical unit where the necessaries for Simms’ procedure were housed. The restraint equipment used for medical procedures was much more humane and thoughtful than anything the Searchlight program ever used; indeed, it was based on the swaddling techniques found to be the most calming for a fussy human infant. Canvas sheets were wrapped around the creature keeping him still and his arms tucked safely away against his torso. He could gain comfort from the fetal position and the literature referred across the board to the increased docility of subjects immediately after swaddling.

Despite all this, the handlers still had a hell of a time getting Charlie to cooperate. The idea of doing this as early as possible was to take advantage of his body’s normal, physiologic cycle for a morning erection but it had proven to be also the time when Charlie was at his most irascible and determinedly uncooperative. When they finally wrestled him into a workable position, safely swaddled but with his lower half exposed, our guest Mr. Simms was wide-eyed and gaping. _Is it always like this?_ I remember him asking of another grad-student in a whisper. His colleagues had simply laughed in response. _Not_ quite _like other primates, are they?_ They had later teased him. I stroked Charlie’s hair (which, back before the Searchlight boys routinely began shaving him bald for their operations, was long and filled with the complicated twists and woven knots seen in wild populations) and he growled a little before settling for glaring at me uneasily. I tried to pet him a few more times, get him a little more relaxed but the stubborn thing was having none of it that morning.

As expected, he also did _not_ enjoy having the electrical stimulation probe inserted into his rectum. It was only a short metal wand, hardly the size of a pencil and even covered in lubricating conduction gel but still he kicked and squirmed like a hare caught in a trap. He hardly would have minded (once he’d gotten used to the sensation) if he’d only stopped fidgeting. He yawped loudly when the current was turned on and it was difficult to keep the probe in the right position as he tried to pull away. I eventually needed the help of two handlers to keep him still enough to find the prostate. After that, everything went like clockwork. He bucked his hips as best he could with each oscillation of the current, each pulse doing its job of filling out his erection perfectly.

The only unfortunate matter was the racket Charlie made in protest at the rough handling. He was only upset about being held down and exposed to an unfamiliar situation but Simms, the poor devil, understanding none of that, was frightened out of the room by the ruckus Charlie made. The young man was supposed to have the honor of collecting the sample himself but, in the end, it was another grad student who caught the hot, white ropes of Charlie’s ejaculate in a test tube and ran off happily to the nearest microscope.

In the end, we found nothing wrong with Charlie’s semen. There were no problems of motility with the sperm, no pH abnormalities with the ejaculate and no paucity of sugar in the semen. The mystery remained as to why Charlie would simply not mate with any of our females. As well, Mr. Simms decided to seek an internship elsewhere.


End file.
